


Running Interference

by ketherphorbia



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bogeyman, Bonding, Horror, Hunters & Hunting, M/M, Monologue, Survival Horror, Vampires, Wilderness, Wilderness Survival, children of atom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-30 22:03:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17836970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ketherphorbia/pseuds/ketherphorbia
Summary: Longfellow comes back after weeks away from Far Harbor with a lavish feast of shellfish... and a horror story regarding how he obtained it.





	Running Interference

While all the Harbormen crowded the dock boilers outside for the feast, the old man who had brought back all that shellfish meat from the hunt sat almost alone in a briny fisherman’s inn with a now-empty bottle of whiskey. Mitch, a younger man with dark hair and a leather jacket, owned The Last Plank, and it was just him and Longfellow. With a hunk of fresh-boiled Fog Crawler the size of his forearm in one hand and a bottle in the other, Mitch strolled up to the old man and slammed down the spirits in front of him.

“How’s about one more round for the huntsman of the year?” Mitch grinned at him with a viscous, adenoidal admiration. “You’ve never really been much one for a crowd, but that had to have been a  _Captain’s Dance_ , Longfellow! You haven’t gone and done anything that crazy in years! You should be soaking up the praise for a job well done. Hahaw, you’ve still got it.”

The hunter with fine white hair sat in silence in his slate grey peacoat and well-worn charcoal scarf, and he stared at the bottle a moment to weigh his thoughts. He grabbed the whiskey with fingerless knit gloves, and uncorked it to pour a fresh shot and down it. He wiped the sorry off his short-bearded silver chin, then poured a second shot and slid it toward the barkeep. With brittle exhaustion, he gave the young man a rough, hoarse caveat:

“You’ll need this if you’re serious about hearing what’s on my mind.”

Mitch let out a strident laugh and sat across from Longfellow at the corner table. Accepting the shot to humor him, he crinkled his nose. He slid the glass back to the septuagenarian with a sly glance.

“Now for this story, do you need to be more sober, or do I need to be less?”

“I don’t think it’s possible for me to be drunk enough for this. Ha! Swear to me you won’t tell a soul.”

“I’m no gossip. I swear it.”

Longfellow stared into the glass as he fidgeted with it and nodded, stifling a purposeless frown as best he could.

“You know how long I’ve hunted Shipbreaker… It’s a complicated emotion, to truly miss something you’ve dedicated so much of your life killing.”

Longfellow trailed off and knocked back another shot, and offered another to Mitch. His plaintive, haunted eyes drifted off to the salt-frosted windows to watch people dancing, eating, and drinking all along the dock. Mitch didn’t understand what the hunter had described until the liquor already burned his mouth, and he choked, eyes thrown wide in amazement.

“You took down Shipbreaker!? We’re supping on the  _Shipbreaker_  tonight!?”

The hunter’s despondent gaze met the barkeep’s, and he closed his weary eyes and shook his head.

“That’s her all right. And a clutch of her kin. There’s worse things out in the Fog than her, it seems–”

“Good god!” Mitch got a wild-eyed, crazy grin and shot up in his seat. “You did the Captain’s Dance to lure her out, didn’t you? I should go get the others! We should all gather ‘round to hear how you felled the terrible Shipbreaker!!”

The old man flipped on him and slammed his hunting knife into the wood table. Mitch flinched and sat back down as Longfellow bared a cornered snarl at him.

“Did you not just hear me! I met something more dangerous than Shipbreaker.” The cherry-nosed old man bestilled himself a mite, more injured than angry. “I have no pride in how she went down.”

Wide-eyed and apologetic, Mitch sat himself back down and continued to gnaw on the hunk of shellfish flesh.

“Dinner and a tale, I suppose…”

The hunter withdrew the knife and put it back in its leather holster, and took a swig straight from the bottle.

“There’s no simple way of saying what I’m about to say, so I guess starting at the beginning is just as good a place as any. I got a wild hair about a month ago, to head out again hunting Shipbreaker. My bones weren’t getting any more limber, and I was growing stir-crazy at my homestead. I started out at the Dalton Farm to the North end of the island. I’d met her there more than anywhere. The telltale radio interference she causes when she’s nearby got stronger as I went Southwest. The Fog was so thick there, and I lost just enough of my bearings right when the signal was getting strongest, that a pack of Fog Ghouls overran me near Echo Lake. There were so many of them, and it happened so fast. A whirlwind of growling nails and snarling teeth. I went unconscious for a time, and I blamed the Rad exposure from the Ghouls for the horrid, lucid nightmares I experienced. I couldn’t tell waking from unconscious for the longest.

“I woke up in a tent pitched about tree roots. It was night, and all I could see was a campfire, and a man in a tricorner cap sitting at it. This man… even then I didn’t rightfully want to call him a man, but then I didn’t understand why… Still woozy, I nearly called out to Erickson on account of his stature. But he wasn’t a super mutant, pacifist or otherwise. His proportions were too close to a man’s, and he wore clothing that covered his whole body. I stared at him too long, and he noticed I was awake. He had already bandaged up my bites and scrapes, and he offered me a remedy for Rads, watery and sweet. It wasn’t spirits, but it eased my aches all the same.

“I kept staring at him, far longer than I should have, trying to make sense of who he was. Thanked him, for not leaving me to the Ghouls. His unspoken  _you’re welcome_  came with a bowl of food he’d just cooked. Told me to break bread with him. I remember the food so… clearly. Everything he cooked, really.” Longfellow squinted at an empty space lost in thought, and took another drink. “Wolf ribs, seasoned with Fog herbs. Lureweed that time.

“I didn’t recognize him for a Harborman. If he’d been a Trapper, he’d have killed and eaten me by then. And if he’d been a Child of Atom, he’d have killed me for being so near to their…  _holy ground_. While we ate, I asked him why he was so deep in the Fog alone.

“He told me, in that low, deep, calm he always spoke in, that it had been serendipity that he’d found me. That he knew me, knew I still hunted the Shipbreaker. He offered me a wineskin, said he’d made it fresh from Hinter herbs. I partook of the dry, heady stuff. He said: ‘We have different motives, but the same goal.’

“I told him he handled himself well for a Mainlander. He wasn’t sure if it was a compliment, but he said to call him August.” Longfellow paused when Mitch squinted through a bite of firm fleshy Fog Crawler, but neither mentioned it. “Wore black head to toe. Had his scarf wrapped tight around his head, and wore his hat atop it. Everything was covered save the front of his face. I noticed he wore a single unit of Marine armor, covering his left leg, and though the yellow painted symbols had faded, it had once belonged to Children. He knew I recognized it, and we made eye contact. He had… pale eyes that almost glowed like the moon under that cap.

“He felt fondness for the Fog, always described it with kindness. He turned his question on me. Wondered if the Fog were as awful as I say, why I would be out this deep in it myself. I told him I’d been close to locating the Shipbreaker again when he found me. He could tell how much the circumstances had affected me.

“Everything he said twisted my sensibilities, but nothing more than that one remark.  _Different motives, same goal._  He always made it so hard to tell him no, and not in the sense anything more than hesitation crossed my mind. It was like he knew exactly, truly, who I am, and what I live for. I could have… I  _should_ have… just come straight home, cut my losses, and nursed my wounds in my own home. But he enticed me with a proposal fit for Ulysses. I know how horrible it must sound, but the thought that my last taste of action might be my getting overwhelmed by those Echo Lake Ghouls just sat wrong with me, when all my life I was a hunter, and he knew it. I needed the hunt, and he knew it.

“Turns out, he wanted to hunt the Shipbreaker with me.

“What he said next should have lit a fire under me to leave once he was asleep. But, like a fool, I stayed. He told me he had wanted for years to return to Far Harbor, and approach me to ask for my help hunting her. Told me that the Condensers at the fringes of the shore made him feel  _uninvited_. He became so childlike and small when he praised that when he couldn’t go to me, I’d come to him. Uninvited. That’s not a word one uses for just any situation. I could blame the liquor for my loose caution, but he had his hooks deep in me, and he knew precisely what I wanted. So I agreed.

“During the day, August almost passed for a man. My distrust of him melted over time. We traveled up and down the western half of the island for weeks, on the hunt of another strong signal. He’s a skilled marksman and butcher, and there wasn’t a day we went hungry–or thirsty, for that matter.” Longfellow guffawed warmly at this part of his story. “Whatever was in that wine, it sharpened all my senses. It’s got to be why I remember everything so evidently. And it had to have everything to do with his keen aim. He never laid traps–even with the rabbits and fowl. If I hadn’t been a part of catching and cleaning, I would have had harder doubts as to what we had been eating. But even my memory leaves me suspect… It worries me, how delicious the food had been… It couldn’t have been natural.

“I noticed at times that he drained the animals into wineskins, rather than let it wash away in the dirt, but I said nothing. Everyone has their superstitions and rituals, and if it worked for him, then it was right for him. It should have upset me, how hard he took a messy kill, as though collecting the blood was just as vital as the meat and hide. It was like he had to have the whole thing. …Whole thing, he knew how to use every bit of an animal, vegetable, or mineral, let me tell you. We ate better than I have in years. Fresh rabbit, wolf, radstag. You name it. And he had a sauce to match each and every one.” The old man’s somber eyes grew distant again with a bitter smile. “I could have sworn it’s been since you had a cook here at the Last Plank, Mitch, that I tasted anything quite like it…”

Up until then, the barkeep had listened patiently, but at the insinuation, Mitch grunted his indignity.

“–Oh,  _forget this_. You did not run into my old cook in the Fog, old man. He left with the Children ten years ago, when Far Harbor ran ‘em off the dock for good.”

“If it’s the same man, he’s not much August anymore. Something far worse. I can stop cutting the fat here, if it’s too much for you. It’s your proximity to the story that I even feel it’s right of me to tell it to you. Maybe I should be telling Avery. Or the Mariner.”

Mitch settled back, and poured himself another shot with an even face.

“No, no. Go on. Even if I can’t believe you, this is already a better tall tale than anything the Mariner’s told in a good while.”

“You’re lucky even I barely believe what happened, or I’d take offense. And you’re lucky she’s not in here to hear you say so.”

As the whiskey bit the back of Mitch’s throat, the barkeep could only close his eyes, exhale through his nose, and nod.

“The weeks felt like years. Pleasant years. I found my loneliness eased. A bond formed between us. Hunting together as we had, it was impossible for one not to form. He already looked up to me, and I came to admire him as well. We learned a lot from each other, even in that short time, with how different our survival skills were. I hoped to know him for a long time, even after we succeeded. But for what I know now, I don’t know that he could leave the Fog, even if he wanted to…”

Longfellow’s face harrowed with more lines than it usually carried, and he knocked back a solid bolt of the whiskey in displeasure.

“I thought often,  _Supposing August should try his hand at the Captain’s Dance_. No better way to overcome whatever hostility the Harbormen could hold against him, than to earn their respect. I couldn’t fathom what could be keeping him out of Far Harbor. I described the Captain’s Dance to him. He glossed over his own personal gain and seized an intense and unwavering belief that the Dance was just what the two of us needed to lure out Shipbreaker. At the time, I felt a good deal ridiculous for never having thought of it myself. I knew one man might not be able to take her down after dealing with waves of shellfish flooding into the mire. But, how he talked– _two_ , working together, that could get us much further. He could handle a Dance. And he insisted that, for all my years of devotion to hunting her, I should get the killing shot when Shipbreaker arrived.

“So, we hunted shellfish near Briney’s Bait n’ Tackle. Littered the swamp with ‘em. A single cut of Radstag Steak in the water lured up the Mirelurks, and their flesh brought up others. The chum kept them coming, wave after wave. We kicked up a ravenous, churning tide. Funny thing, I kept to my Henrietta, and up until that day he’d relied on a lever action rifle. He knew as well as any seasoned Harborman that bullets don’t do much against the oversized beasts’ carapaces. He dove in the melee with a machete notched just for husking them. The knife ripped right into the soft underbelly of those Mirelurks, and it did a swift job knocking off legs and pincers when the next mark on the food chain showed up. I’ve never seen a body take a Fog Crawler with a  _blade_ , Mitch. They’re too big, and too fast. But there August was, focused on slowing them down so I could get a steady shot. He’d cut off as many legs as he could get at, and move on to the next one, leaving the kill for me. As hungry for fresh meat as the beasts were, he was hungrier still to fell them. He truly did  _dance_ for her.

“In the moment, any worry I’d had that he could be a Child of Atom washed away. They can’t stand the thought of killing Fog creatures unless it’s for food. They don’t care if the things kill innocent folks–”

Longfellow quietened himself by finishing off the whiskey. Once his head swam, he continued.

“Well, his plan worked. After I’d fired the killing blow on the third Fog Crawler to beset us, the radio on my belt fritzed out like it was the End Times all over again. We’d been killing the Shipbreaker’s babies, and she was  _furious_. The moment had come. I could feel it. I’d been hefting around a Harpoon Gun in the hopes I could finish her with it, and I got my chance. August went to lob off her legs just like he had with her offspring, but he chopped off just one of the eight before she leaped up and knocked him flat in the water. With her off-rhythm, I hooked her in the side with a harpoon, and did my best to rope her around a nearby tree. She still overpowered me uncontested, and I had to let go or risk her drowning me in the mire. But I’d bought August time enough to recover. He grabbed the rope still hanging off her neck, and scaled her, and mounted her shoulders, to rein her by her antennae… He yelled for me to fire again while he had her disoriented. The second harpoon– it got her right… through the skull…”

Trembling, the old man fell silent when his voice began to break. His unease was catching, though Mitch still couldn’t quite glean what had Longfellow so tormented.

“Longfellow, you should be over the moon she’s dead. This is something to celebrate! You know my Uncle Ken is out at the National Park on his own, and he does just fine, though I miss him something sorry. Surely, there’s no harm in letting August live wherever he pleases on the island. Right? All the better, if he’s left the Children like you say he has.”

“That harpoon also bolted August through the chest. He didn’t seem more than shocked for the longest, and I was positive in the moment that I’d lost the closest to a son I’d ever had. The first thing he did was sever her head, skewered to his body. And he climbed down… and right away insisted upon butchering her. Like all the landbound wasteland marks, he began by draining Shipbreaker also. Drained something foul as sin from her. Only after he collected that oily, shimmering stuff did he sit down in a dry patch, to remove the creature’s head and harpoon from his chest, and tend to what should have been a fatal wound.

“I recognized the Stimpak. He used two, one to stop the bleeding, and the other to close the wound. But then… Then, all those wineskins of blood he’d kept from his kills, he… He uncorked a smaller one, and downed it like a lush to cheap wine. I objected, told him he was disoriented from the fight and blood loss, insisted that he hadn’t drunk his wine– but had drunk one of his drained kills.” Longfellow’s hand had crept up trembling over his mouth for what he said next. “He looked to me with a weak guilt, put the cork back in the wineskin, and grabbed for a second. God, I hope the wine he and I shared hadn’t been the same as that. He cradled her head in his lap for some time with… a romantic finality.

“Given time to recollect himself, August pulled the scarf down off his head to rest around his shoulders, and retrieved his hat. Until then I’d never seen his long, dark hair pulled back beneath that scarf, let alone his pointed ears, or wiry, bushed-out sidewhiskers. I half expected him to have wicked teeth to go with all of that. Though still weakened from the battle, he took care of butchering Shipbreaker as well as her kin. I helped as I was able, too stunned to really object. The Mirelurk, too, where we could salvage. He didn’t want a thing to go to waste.

“He wouldn’t have any of my praise–not that I had much of anything to say at the sight of his full face. He fried up the smallest tail for us to split. Seasoned it and made it good and spicy. He told me I could take all the meat back for the Harbormen. That he couldn’t reasonably take that much food with him. That he’d gotten what he came for, besides. He asked me if I wanted to keep her head, to mount. I should have let him. I don’t think I can look her in the eyes.

“With him insisting we part ways, I got the nerve to address all the things that had chewed at me from the start. Those nightmares I had from the Rad Poisoning, one of them was my first memory of him approaching my fight with the Ghouls. All he did was… he laid his hands on them, and spoke calmly, and they all stopped and… stared at me at once.” He sneered to keep himself from crying. “He described what he’d done as ‘reminding the Ghouls what they are.’ He took them back to Echo Lake once he’d made sure I was safe.

“To hear part of what I remembered of that day had been correct, he had me reeling. I didn’t want to know the truth about anything else. Let alone him implying that he hadn’t killed a single one of those ferals, just…  _left them there_. I didn’t understand that if Fog creatures listened to him, what use I could have served him hunting Shipbreaker. He said, ‘The Shipbreaker wasn’t some simple Fog Ghoul. She was an avatar of the Fog itself.’ Said the Children of the Nucleus are just as myopic as anyone else. That they worship a god far smaller than they realize. Said Atom is in all of us.’

“I asked him, just how long he’d been in the Fog. Told him his head was on all wrong. He insisted that he’s no Trapper. That he’s eaten Trappers, but human flesh doesn’t…  _satisfy_ …” He wore his nausea on his face, and rubbed at his bearded chin with a glassy-eyed snivel. “He’d always respected me fondly in his youth. I reminded him of his grandfather in West Virginia. He didn’t want to rob me of killing Shipbreaker. Knew how much my vengeance meant to me. But that he… had to have her…

“He’s more Fog than Man now. When I wouldn’t press him to explain himself with his features revealed after all our time together, he still felt I deserved to know what he was. He’s… made Stimpaks from Wasteland blood since he was a boy. He started mostly with insects, something he called a Bloodbug, but he keeps moving on to bigger and bigger beasts. Said the chemicals in Bloodbug glands made him able to hold more and more radiation… more of his god’s holy light… and that devoting himself to the habit was making his soul as big and plentiful an offering as he could possibly give Atom. And he’s convinced that the only way to achieve what his god requires of him is to hunt and…  _add_  the life force of these things to himself. He hunted Shipbreaker, to make Stimpaks from her. To subsume her.”

The old man had finally had enough, and relented to letting himself cry. Mitch had never seen Longfellow like this, and reacted the only way he knew how. He got up and brought him a bottle of the good vodka. As he sat back down, Longfellow eyed the bottle, and slowly smiled and chuckled. He gave Mitch a firm pat on the hand and cracked open the spirits.

“He left the Children because what he was doing was too much even for their demented faith. They’d warped him since his childhood to be led down a path to feel the need to do such a thing to himself… and he couldn’t see that what he’s doing exceeds even what’s acceptable by their morals. But the worst of it isn’t knowing what he is, Mitch. It’s  _not_ knowing exactly what he is.”

“I’m supposing you didn’t kill him.”

“I didn’t think I could! I froze up. Especially when he told me that he’d come to care too deeply about me to let any harm come to me. I figured, if I survived to get back to Far Harbor, maybe the superstition that the Fog Condensers could keep him away would afford me the ability to regroup, think things through. Sure enough, when he accompanied me, he halted twenty yards back from the furthest Condenser pillars, and from there watched me return safe inside the hull. He was gone, the next I looked back.”

Longfellow’s glassy eyes grew wild as he gesticulated with the fifth of vodka. Mitch was unquestionably shaken, shimmering with sweat.

“If I hunt him, do I hunt a man or beast? If I trap him, is he imprisoned or captured? As far as I can tell, his only crimes are against nature, and he’s done no ill toward the Harbormen. I’m… I’m just a tired old man. I don’t know how to rid this place of something I’m not even sure can die.” His head snapped up with alarmed conviction. “I have to speak with DiMA. Ask for more Fog Condensers. He’d understand.”

“You’d… better talk to Captain Avery before you even consider going up the mountain to talk to the Metal Man. Besides… aren’t you worried you’d encounter August in the Fog on your way up there?”

“If I ever step foot outside the hull again in my life, he’ll be in my shadow every step I take. I just pray that the next time I encounter radio interference, I’m not alone.”


End file.
